Citizen Voting Power Map

From the New York Times:

This map shows each state re-sized in proportion to the relative influence of the individual voters who live there. The numbers indicate the total delegates to the Electoral College from each state, and how many eligible voters a single delegate from each state represents.

Comments

[robreed]

This raises an Interesting question, namely what does 'relative influence of the individual voters' mean? The map demonstrates the idea that some states might be underrepresented or overrepresented in the electoral college but this isn't how I would characterize 'relative influence...'.

For example, WY which is, I'm fairly sure, the most overrepresented state (it certainly is one of the largest states on the map) votes strongly Republican (it has voted for the Republican candidate in all but one election since 1952). This year McCain won the state with 65% of the votes and that result was never in question. So to my way of thinking the influence of a single voter in WY is relatively small. Voting for the Republican candidate, who is sure to win the state, is somewhat pointless, like adding a bucket of water to a lake. On the other hand, voting the Democrat is equally meaningless, because it will not help that candidate to win the state. For that matter, voting for one of the other candidates will not only fail to win that state for that person (of course), but it will also not affect the balance between the Democrat and Republican. I live in MA and the situation is similar (dependably Democratic when it comes to National elections).

The votes that really count are the all important swing states (generally speaking any state decided by a close margin). In those states every single vote could actually be important. Take North Carolina for example, not only are the 15 electoral college votes in play, but the state came in at a 50% / 50% split with 2,123,395 votes for Obama and 2,109,492 for McCain. That's a difference of only 13,903 or approx .003% of the total number of votes cast for either candidate. That's a state where people should be all but killing themselves to get to vote. With a race that close it's conceivable that the town of Fuquay-Varina NC population approx 15,500 could decide the result of the U.S. presidential race.

That's the map I'd like to see. To really understand the significance of every vote in those states, all we have to do add info about numbers of voters and non-voters for those states. There are easily hundreds of thousands of votes left off the table in states like this. It would be easy to argue that these non-voters have had a huge impact on the outcome of the election.

OK, I've convinced myself to do that map.